Contact Information

Gulf South Summit on Service-Learning

Conference Overview

At the 2012 conference we honor those who have gone before, and we look ahead to new frontiers of community service and civic engagement. In the words of Ernest Boyer in Scholarship Reconsidered (1990):

The aim of education is not only to prepare students for productive careers, but also to enable them to live lives of dignity and purpose; not only to generate new knowledge, but to channel that knowledge to humane ends; not merely to study government, but to help shape a citizenry that can promote the public good. Thus, higher education’s vision must be widened if the nation is to be rescued from the problems that threaten to diminish permanently the quality of life.

Those new frontiers remain the old ones, “living lives of dignity and purpose; . . . channel[ing] knowledge to humane ends; . . . [and] shaping a citizenry that can promote the public good.” So come join us, March 21-23, at the Lake Terrace Convention Center, in Hattiesburg, Miss., with host institution, The University of Southern Mississippi, and colleagues across the nation to celebrate the Summit’s ground-breaking past and launch its second decade of courageous work.

Keynote Sessions

Thursday, March 22, 8:30-9:15 a.m.Civic Engagement: The State of the Field, Jeffrey Howard, Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning; Trish Kalivoda, Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement and Cassie Simon, Journal of Community Engagement and Scholarship

Friday, March 23, 1:15-2: p.m.Civil Conversations, Krista Tippett, host of National Public Radio’s Krista Tippett on Being, author and journalist

Pre-Conference Workshops

Wednesday, March 21, 1-4 p.m.

Service-Learning 101, Pre-Conference Session: Service-Learning Directors: Expectations and Goals, Shirley Theriot, director of the Center for Community Service Learning, University of Texas at Arlington; Mary Beth Lima, director of the Center for Community Engagement, Learning and Leadership, Louisiana State University; Tom Schnaubelt, executive director of the Haas Center for Public Service, Stanford University

Democratic Engagement in a Technocratic World: Fulfilling the Potential of Service-Learning and Community Engagement, Patti Clayton, senior scholar with the Center for Service and Learning, Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis

Breaking into Print: The Nuts and Bolts of Publishing Your Community-Engaged Scholarship, Editors: Jeffrey Howard, Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning; Trish Kalivoda, Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement; and Cassie Simon, Journal of Community Engagement and Scholarship

Citizen-Leader Development Through Community Engagement, Cathy Hamilton, director, Office of Leadership and Service-Learning, University of North Carolina—Greensboro; Kim Shaver, Center for Civic Engagement, Leadership and Service, University of LouisvilleTapping the Resources of Campus Compact, Maureen Curley, executive director, Campus Compact

ConferenceTheme

The conference theme is “Transforming Lives Through Collaboration, Community and Citizenship.” Please consider addressing the theme from the following directions.

Transforming lives: Whose lives are we transforming? Students? Faculty? Clients of our community partners? To what ends? Where’s your evidence? What are the best practices?

Collaboration: How difficult it can be, given our differing goals, values and constituencies! How do we do it? What are its essential ingredients?

Community: Warm, fuzzy feeling or concrete achievement? How do we know it when we see it? Can it be operationalized and duplicated?

Citizenship: How do we nurture this originating objective of the civic engagement movement? What is my role? What is the role of public policy? How shall we influence public policy?

Of course, any well-reasoned and useful study is welcomed.

Presentation Formats

Individual Presentation—30-minute presentation that the Program Committee will group with another presentation in a 75-minute session

Panel—75-minute session with three to four presenters assembled by a primary presenter

Interactive Workshop—75-minute, hands-on training session facilitated by one or more co-presenters

Poster--visual display of a research project or demonstration project; full color, 48” x 48” maximum size